Science Bulletins: Thinking in Symbols

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Science Bulletins: Thinking in Symbols

Modern human culture underwent a "creative explosion" in Ice Age Europe 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. The evidence, which ranges from fantastic cave paintings to elaborate graves to innovative tools, is a sure sign that human symbolic thought-our ability to create and combine meaningful symbols to represent the world-was in full bloom. What evolutionary steps seeded this mental flowering? This Human Bulletin video follows the ongoing excavations of Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist who is seeking the earliest evidence of our species' unique mental powers. Recent finds dating to 72,000 years ago at his South African excavation site, Blombos Cave, are slowly shedding light an era of human culture that has been all but dark.

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06:57

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